Question: I’m an amateur web designer and am always looking for great tips in this area. Could you highlight a few tips you may have in regards to web design?

Answer: Where to start? There are so many things that are out there in regards to web design that it is truly hard to know where to start. I will highlight two things that I have found very helpful in the last few months.

First, if you haven’t already, you should download the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. You will need to download Firefox first if you don’t already have it and then go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60 to download the toolbar.

Some of the great features of this toolbar include easy viewing of CSS code and page elements like images and tables. It also has small screen rendering so you can get an idea of what your page may look like on a PDA or cell phone.

To learn more about the Web Developer toolbar add on go to Webmaster Tips at http://tips.webdesign10.com/web-developer-toolbar.htm.

Another cool tool that I find myself using quite a bit is a small program called Pixie. You can download Pixie at the Nattyware website at http://www.nattyware.com. Have you ever found yourself wanting to know what a particular color is on graphic or website? Well Pixie makes it easy to find out. Simply run the program and anytime you run your mouse over an area that has a color the program will display the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color. You can then use the values to reproduce the color in your other programs such as Dreamweaver or Photoshop. It also shows the current X and Y position of your mouse pointer.

There are so many great web design tools that are out there. These are just two that I selected to highlight. I hope you find them helpful!

–Carrie Albin, Outreach Coordinator and Co-Editor

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Q&A Ask the Experts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.